My weekend movie: Suspicion (1941)

The sight of an eligible male was a rare treat in that part of the Country…

A plain young woman, destined to perpetual spinsterhood, meets by chance on a train one of the most charming eligible bachelors of the Country and decides not to miss the boat. He seems to fall in love, the only trouble is that she has no idea he’s also an incurable liar, a scoundrel and maybe even something more terrifying…

Suspicion )Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is the premise of Suspicion, Alfred Hitchcock’s fourth american movie, made and released in 1941, a psychological thriller set in the pre-WWII England (at least the cliché pre-WWII England that could be reproduced in Hollywood) and not very faithfully based onBefore the facta 1932 novel written by Frances Iles (one of the several pen names used by the English crime writer Anthony Berkeley Cox). It’s the second and final collaboration with Rebecca’s star Joan Fontaine and the first with his favourite alter ego: Cary Grant.

SPOILER ALERT: if you’ve never watched this film before, here is your last chance to go and fetch a copy…otherwise you are going to read the rest of this article at your own risk.

The story is all about Lina (Joan Fontaine), a young and inexperienced woman coming from a very good family who, discovering one day that her overprotecting parents are preparing for her a quiet country life as a dignified spinster, decides to throw herself to Johnny Aysgarth (Cary Grant), a very charming and notorious womaniser she hardly knows. Against her family wishes Lina elopes to happily live a whirlwind romance, but once the honeymoon comes to an end she has to face reality: her beloved husband is nothing but a serial sponger who loves the easy life, luxury and horse racings, and thinks he could live on her income. Sadly, Johnny has to face reality too: Lina’s income ain’t what he expected so he has to work or at least try to work, or maybe pretend to work… At first, Lina seems to find Johnny’s attitude quite funny and believes he’s on his way to change for good, but when she meets Beaky, one of her husband’s oldest friends, she finds out that he has no intention to change. Then a series of events, included Beaky’s very mysterious death happened before he could dissolve a society made with Johnny (Beaky provided the money, Johnny the ideas), make her suspicious: maybe she married an assassin….

Suspicion left Hitchcock dissatisfied, disappointed and with some regret. What was the trouble?

Lina and Johnny (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Surely not the leading lady. Joan Fontaine was absolutely perfect, even a bit too perfect to play the fragile and insecure girl who falls in love with a scoundrel and then is consumed with the doubt he could be a murderer. Lina after all was a sister, or at least a cousin, of young Mrs de Winter, the protagonist of Rebecca, the first movie she had made with Hitchcock in 1940, the one that had projected her into Hollywood stardom after many disappointing years when she was overshadowed by her sister Olivia de Havilland who had made a name for herself starring alongside Errol Flynn in Warner Brothers movies (not to mention, of course, Gone with the Wind). The idea to cast Joan Fontaine proved to be so good that in 1942 she became the only actor to ever win an Academy Award in a film directed by Hitchcock, winning as Best Leading Actress five years before her older sister could achieve the same goal in 1947 for To Each His Own (anyway someone said this was a compensation for the Oscar lost the previous year when she was nominated for Rebecca).

So, what was the trouble? Maybe the fact that the two protagonists didn’t get on well (years later Joan will say that Cary Grant simply didn’t understand that the protagonist was Lina)? Maybe the trouble was the set, too artificial and not very British, or the too glossy photography Hitchcock complained about years later in Truffaut’s interview? (by the way, many thanks to the French director for his long interview!) Well, all those things was probably a part of it, but the real trouble was… Cary Grant!

Cary Grant in 1941 (photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to Hitchcock in fact the actor, that later became his favourite alter ego, was probably the main reason (along with Hollywood censorship) for the numerous changes made to the original story. In Frances Iles’ novel Johnny was an impenitent libertine (before and after the marriage), and above all was a real murderer and… Cary Grant could not be a murderer! Audiences didn’t want him to be a murderer and RKO, the Studio producing the film (Hitchcock had been happily lent by David O. Selznick, the man who brought him to Hollywood in 1939), didn’t want him to be a murderer too and in fact trying to cut every scene suggesting Johnny’s evil nature reduced the movie to a 55 minute length but then restored Hitchcock version because that way the film simply didn’t make sense. If you watch the movie you’ll understand why nobody wanted the coolest man ever turned into a murderer: the scene when, after catching Lina trying to persuade Beaky not to become his buisiness partner, Johnny scolds her in a menacing tone following her up the stairs is one of the most disturbing Cary Grant ever performed. Better not to turn Cary into a murderer, at least not in 1941. Unfortunately that way Hitchcock had to put aside the final scene he had imagined, made to perfectly match the famous “milk scene” with Johnny carrying upstairs in half-light a glass of glowing milk (Hitchcock asked to put a light bulb in it to draw our attention to the glass) to finally put it beside Lina’s bed while his wife fears it’s poisoned. The never-made scene (apparently closer to the novel’s mood) had to show Lina, perfectly knowing the milk is poisoned and yet ready to swallow it, asking Johnny to post a letter she wrote to her mother. The following morning when Lina is already dead, a cheerful Johnny post the letter not knowing that in it Lina revealed to her mother that he was her assassin.

Suspicion ain’t Hitchcock’s best film, surely all the faults Hitchcock saw in it are real (after all, I wouldn’t dare to contradict the master), and surely the ending is weak, and yet it’s a charming film. Maybe it’s because of Cary Grant, or maybe cause it reminds me to Rebecca (which is one of my favourite movies and the first Hitchcock’s film I’ve ever seen, but I already told you about that), but this is one of those movies I can’t ignore and watch again now and then. I suggest you to do the same.

A few free-associated movies you could also like (click on the title to watch a clip or the trailer):